The U.P.’s own sweet-and-spicy sausage sandwich was born in 1936 and is almost impossible to find anywhere else
Ask a Yooper about cudighi and watch their eyes light up. Ask almost anyone else and you will get a blank stare. This sweet-and-spicy sausage sandwich is one of the U.P.’s best-kept secrets.
If you grew up around Marquette or Ishpeming, you already know. For everyone else, here is what you have been missing.
Cudighi (say it “COO-duh-ghee”) is an Italian sausage like no other. It is seasoned with sweet spices, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and cloves, along with garlic and a splash of red wine. That warm, almost holiday-like spice blend is what sets it apart from any Italian sausage you have had downstate.
Most often, you will get it as a sandwich. A cooked patty piled on a long, crusty roll, smothered in tomato sauce and melted mozzarella, sometimes with onions, peppers, or mushrooms on top.
The story goes back to 1936.
Italian immigrants had come to Marquette County for the iron mines, and one of them set up a little sausage stand, tucked between his family’s barbershop and the local bar. He sold homemade sausage sandwiches dressed with onions, ketchup, and mustard, and he kept his spice recipe a closely guarded secret. He called it gudighi.
After World War II, as pizza swept across America, his son gave it a makeover. He flattened the sausage into a patty, added marinara and mozzarella, and the modern cudighi was born. The name drifted from gudighi to cudighi, and before long every deli and pizza joint in the county had its own version.
Food historians trace it back to cotechino, a sausage from northern Italy. But here is the funny part.
Go to Italy today and ask for cudighi, and you will get a shrug. The name and the recipe, as Yoopers know them, basically do not exist anywhere else on earth.
Which is exactly why it hits so hard for the Yoopers who moved away. You cannot just order a cudighi in Detroit or Chicago. A handful of spots downstate carry it, but for most of the diaspora, a real cudighi means a trip home.
If you are lucky enough to be up north, you will find it at pizza places, delis, and pasty shops all over Marquette County, from Vango’s in Marquette to Tino’s longtime family recipe.
It sits right alongside the humble pasty as a U.P. food that tells the story of who settled here.
And like so much of U.P. life, it is one more thing that makes the place feel like its own little country, which, as it turns out, it once tried to become.
So if you have never had a cudighi, put it on the list for your next trip up north. And if you grew up on them, well, you already know that first warm, spiced bite tastes exactly like home.
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Topics: cudighi, U.P. food, Marquette County, Ishpeming, Italian heritage, pasty, Upper Peninsula, Yooper, sandwich
Sources: Atlas Obscura, Travel Marquette, and Upper Michigan’s Source.
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